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For many years now I’ve wanted to write a book. It’s been a desire of mine for absolute ages; I love the idea of storytelling, being able to express action and emotion in the written form. It’s a creative part of me that I’ve wanted to express but lacked confidence to do it.

I’ve got a vague idea in my mind in terms of the core plot but not too sure of the genre to use. There are the classical genres like Fantasy, Sci-fi or post-apocalyptic. There is also the notion of trying modern day, typically war related like Tom Clancy style. People like to escape their own lives and live out the life of others which is exciting and adventurous, with the romantic notion that the hero always wins and the bad guy is defeated.

Conspiracy theories are another form that could be explored. People are fixated with this topic; the possibility that there are ulterior motives behind everything seems to prick the imagination.

Now as a strange side effect, I don’t read a lot of books myself, that’s my wife’s domain. I find that the patience to sit and read hours on end eludes me. It’s a bit like Golf, I’m not a fan of watching the sport on TV but do enjoy playing the game.

Yesterday I had a full blog typed up and ready to post, went into WordPress for it to not only not publish my post, but for it to completely lose all my work. Talk about frustration, considering it happened at the end of the day. I just packed my bags and trundled off home.

As mentioned in my last post, I had decided to cancel my subscription to WOW really out of boredom more than anything else. Thinking that I needed a change of scenery I gave Guild Wars 2 a bash. Initially I was enjoying in the game, I found the mechanics enjoyable, especially the dodge mechanics, knowing that I was in control of avoiding damage and not RNG was to me refreshing.

I’m finding that my boredom however extends beyond that of WOW and into the Fantasy world and MMO’s, possibly even gaming in general. The biggest problem for me is time, and let’s be very honest; most MMO’s have a time investment attached to it. Like most things in life you need to put time and effort in to it in order gain the benefits out of it. At the moment I just don’t have the time anymore to play on a regular basis.

The yearning to game is still there but right now there is nothing that peaks my interest.

Life has really just taken over any and all of my time, to the point that I’m hardly getting a chance to login and do any gaming.

In Azeroth I’ve been logging in with one purpose only and that is to kill Kroll the Blade in the hopes of getting the Elixir of Ancient knowledge. I’ve managed to snag two of them for my Monk who is sitting at level 78. His game time has almost come to a grinding halt. This due to the fact that I’m completely bored with Warcraft; everything is just too dammed familiar. Seven years of the game tends to do that to a person. I need to do a detox from WOW. I used to watch a number of Twitch stream and subscribe to a few YouTube channels, I’ve stopped this completely.

I cancelled all my EVE online accounts (Two), stopped playing Diablo, which to me was a let-down anyway along with StarCraft. I do enjoy gaming but I found myself stretched thin across to many games with no focus. Even in WOW I’ve got far too many characters that have inhibited me from zeroing in on one character and mastering his abilities.

I’m in no ways stopping the Blog; I love the art of writing, it’s almost a dying art in this day and age which in my own strange way I want to conserve by way of this form of expression. It’s just that when you lose interest in an activity, the drive to blog about it goes out of the window.

I have three kids that take up a lot of my time, especially my daughter who is going to be two in October. I can’t neglect her at this young age, she is far too impressionable.

Another area of my life that is changing is diet and exercise, I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have a weight problem, but it doesn’t stop the fact that I need to eat better and exercise more. All these factors take away from game time and let’s be honest are far more important. At this moment I probably spend about 3 hours a week playing WOW which is minimal and almost not worth the subscription value anymore.

Life right now holds far most interest for me than the digital world of gaming. I want to get out more, be there for my family and just enjoy the experience.

I do have other games that I’m enjoying right now which are new and exciting for me

The family and I took a much needed vacation out at Sun City, partially because it was paid for by my Wife’s work and also because it served the purpose of watching a 4×4 Rally being held out there. That was the exiting bit which my sons really enjoyed. One can’t believe how fast these drivers go on dirt, they have some serious skill. It was great to just get away into the South African bushveld and enjoy the surroundings it has on offer.

Game time has been a bit limited as I got a new computer, so setting everything up the way I like it takes time. With the new setup I took the advantage of creating a new UI in WOW as well, this is still a work in progress; I’m a bit minimalist in nature, hate having too much clutter on my screen. Either the Addon servers a purpose or it goes.

With regards to my Monk, I hoped onto to him this past weekend and levelled him to 74 in about 2 hours or so. I’m actually setting him up to do some quick levelling when he hits 80. I’ve managed to get an Elixir of ancient knowledge from Krol the Blade in dread Wastes via my Feral Druid. In fact got the Elixir on my second kill, have had many attempts but one tends to get ganked a lot.

If you don’t know, the elixir grants you 300% increase in xp gained up to level 84 and lasts an for one hour. So my aim is to try and get a few more of these, but they don’t come around that easily.

I’ve also continued on my Warrior on Guild Wars 2. I have a number of mates who play the game that have begged me to join them. I must say that the graphics in GW2 are exceptional to say the least. The play style is a lot different but I’m starting to enjoy myself now that i understand the mechanics a bit better. Levelling for me is slow but I hope by the time I hit 30 or so that this will speed up.

Often you get mails or adverts that tell you that you can level a character to 90 in four days. I’m going to assume that the mean 4 days /played time. Now one of my biggest drivers for levelling my Monk is to see if I can get him to 90 in fewer than four days.

Here is my progress so far

Vanilla: 23 hours 49 minutes played

Burning Crusade: 10 hours 16 minutes played

Reached Northrend in 1 day 10 hours 5 minutes played

I’m using all manner of tricks to try and boost my levelling speed. I have seven heirloom items and I try get as much rested XP as possible. Monks have additional advantage of getting a buff to XP gained when you complete a daily quest at the Peak of Serenity. I’ve even forgone levelling any form of profession as I don’t want any distractions. In fact if you go to my Armory under the Professions link it Quotes “Hrmm… This character isn’t very helpful without professions.

To give one an idea of how I’m avoiding distractions, my monk hasn’t even set foot in a battleground as in my view they do not give any decent amount of XP. Now for someone who loves PvP you can imagine how tough this is for me. I have no view of how good or bad a monk is in battlegrounds.

I’m hoping to finish Northrend by the time I get to two days played. In order to complete this I’m building up some rested XP. This is a solo effort, I don’t have a pocket healer or a group helping me mob tag, it’s just questing and the odd instance or two.

I plan to start out at the Howling Fjord due to what I think is a bit of a glitch. Just outside the camp at Howling Fjord there is a constant rush of mobs, never ending rush in fact, here you can kill mobs every few seconds and gain a large amount of XP. I did it before on a previous character whereby I levelled to 70 in next to no time.

Nethaera from Blizzard has written a comprehensive article on her Blog regarding Proving Grounds. I for one will be utilizing this feature once 5.4 goes live. Often you will find me testing out rotations at a training dummy, but if you aren’t a DPS spec then you are limited for places to “Practice” especially if you are a healing class and to a lesser extent a Tank. You can’t exactly taunt the training dummy to attack you.

The other cool feature is the availability of four different modes namely: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Endless

I for one think that proving grounds, along with the dropping of arena teams is almost a quality of life change in WOW. This along with Blizzard allowing cross realm teams to compete in arenas.